‘The Fourth Kind’ continues our decades-long fascination with alien abduction

Milla Jovovich stars in this Alaska-set paranormal thriller, but it’s just one of a slew of works dealing with alien abduction.

The Fourth Kind, Milla Jovovich, Hakeem Kae-Kazim, Elias Koteas

Milla Jovovich, Hakeem Kae-Kazim and Elias Koteas in ‘The Fourth Kind’. Source: Roadshow Films

First thing’s first. While it purports to be based on real events, complete with lead actor Milla Jovovich addressing the camera as the film opens and proclaiming that what we are about to see is a series of re-enactments of actual, documented events and archival footage, The Fourth Kind is a work of fiction. The English-language film from debuting director Olatunde Osunsanmi works a benign grift that’s familiar to anyone who has seen The Blair Witch Project or even Fargo, slyly building up the real world bona fides of its story for narrative and artistic purposes.

You would think that audiences would not be fooled, given that The Fourth Kind deals with the topic of alien abduction. (Like Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the title comes from

J. Allen Hynek’s system of classification

Milla Jovovich stars in ‘The Fourth Kind’. Source: Roadshow Films

Jovovich plays psychologist Abigail Tyler, a resident of remote Nome, Alaska, who begins to suspect she’s onto something big and frightening when a number of her patients report visions of owls while under hypnosis. As she digs deeper into the mystery with the help of fellow shrink Abel Campos (Elias Koteas) and earns the scorn of the local Sheriff, August Thompson (Will Patton), it becomes increasingly clear that a spate of disappearances and other inexplicable phenomena might be due to a rash of alien abductions – the fourth kind of close encounter.

Will Patton as the local Sheriff in ‘The Fourth Kind’. Source: Roadshow Films

Which is nonsense, right? Aliens don’t come down and snatch up unsuspecting humans to take them on a tour of the cosmos or probe their recta. Except that abduction stories are centuries old. The phenomenon used to get attributed to faerie folk or whatever the local equivalent is, but the rise of square-jawed 20^th century science and the possibility of life on other planets has seen the blame shift to little green men. Or little grey men. Or reptoids or golden-haired Aryan aliens, or whatever the current extra-terrestrial (

or ultra-terrestrial

) flavour of the month happens to be. The set dressing changes but the stories remain the same, and we tell these stories through film and TV these days.

The big dog is, of course, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the 1977 film that saw Spielberg revisit themes he first addressed in his 1964 amateur effort, Firelight. Richard Dreyfuss is Roy Neary, the working class electrician who experiences psychic contact from an alien civilisation, eventually leaving behind his family to leave with them on their spacecraft. Earlier in the film a toddler is actually abducted, but Spielberg’s benign aliens bring him back eventually – while occasionally creepy, Close Encounters paints a hopeful picture of alien contact.

Not so the big dog of the small screen, The X-Files, which has done more to popularise UFOlogy than any other work before or since. Heroic FBI agent and paranormal investigator Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) is motivated to chase down the weirder cold cases in the FBI vault by having witnessed his sister being abducted by aliens as a child, exposing him to whole vistas of weirdness, culminating in a covert attempt by hostile aliens to colonise Earth. Mulder’s investigations encompassed 11 seasons and over 200 episodes, and by the time The X-Files wrapped up, it was easier to count the characters who had not been whisked away by flying saucers.

Catch up with some classic X-Files action
at SBS On Demand
, including a tale about an alien baseball player:

Those are fictions, of course, but other abductee movies purport to be based on fact. Author Whitley Strieber not only gave us the horror novels The Wolfen and The Hunger – both the basis for great films, by the way – in 1987 he published the book Communion, detailing his supposed experiences as an alien abductee. In 1989 French-Australian director Phillippe Mora brought the book to the screen with Christopher Walken playing Strieber, a casting choice that somewhat dulled the impact, seeing as Walken is a pretty alien guy himself.

Better, then, is the 1993 film Fire in the Sky, which recounts the 1975 abduction of timber worker Travis Walton (D.B. Sweeney), who disappeared for five days and claimed to have been aboard an alien craft during that time. Even more so than Close Encounters, Fire in the Sky is a working-class alien abduction film, and its depiction of blue collar rural folks (including Robert Patrick, later of The X-Files, James Garner, Craig Sheffer, Peter Berg, and Henry Thomas of E.T.) grappling with inexplicable phenomena helps ground the very concept.

Now, all these works deal with the iconic Grey aliens – the little guys with big black eyes, slit mouths, and bulging crania that have become our default concept of strange visitors from another planet, but which came first?

It’s a bit of a “chicken or egg?” question; as notions of what aliens might look like propagate through the culture, reports of encounters with creatures who just happen to look just like that increase. Grey alien sightings – and abductions – saw a steady rise throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, coinciding with little grey men appearing in Close Encounters, The X-Files, and on the side of bongs. Prior to that, reptilian creatures, so-called “Nordic” humanoids, and even giants were more common (that latter seemingly inspired by the robot Gort in 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, and I’d be interested to know if we got more Reptilians following the 1967 Star Trek episode, “Arena”).

The Fourth Kind, Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas

Psychologists Abby Tyler (Milla Jovovich) and Abel Campos (Elias Koteas) in ‘The Fourth Kind’. Source: Roadshow Films

Which brings us back to The Fourth Kind, with its owl motif. Owls kind of look like grey aliens, with their big, blank eyes, rounded heads, and smooth features, and so the idea of an encounter with a Grey being interpreted as an owl by a confused and frightened human mind might occur to a canny filmmaker. Prior to the film’s release in 2009, the connection between owls and aliens doesn’t appear in the public UFO record. Afterwards? A marked uptick in owl-like alien encounters, witnesses correlating their dreams of owls with alien abductions, and even a number of books on the very subject (one, Stories From The Messengers by Mike Clelland, even boasts an introduction by Strieber).

Now, maybe that tells us that UFO abductees are simple fabulists, taking their cues from the pop culture of the day. Or perhaps they’re experiencing something alien, if not to this world, then at least to mainstream human experience, and filtering it through symbols they can understand. Or maybe – and it’s a long shot – the owls are really not what they seem, as David Lynch once mused. In any case, The Fourth Kind is not just a UFO movie, it has contributed to UFO culture, which makes it much more interesting than your usual rank and file paranormal.